Official site of author and historian Sean Munger.

Sailing west from Byzantium: Columbus and the fall of Constantinople.

Five hundred and twenty-one years ago today, as the summer of 1492 turned to fall, Christopher Columbus and his expedition were somewhere on the North Atlantic, several weeks away from the discovery that would make him–and them–famous. Most of us know the story of Columbus’s voyage, his idea to sail west to find a route to India, his difficulty in gaining backing, and the ultimate semi-success of his efforts; I say semi because he failed to find India, although he believed until the end of his life that he had. What fewer people understand is why this epic voyage happened, and it has a lot more to do with the history of Byzantium than most realize.

The Byzantine Empire breathed its last on the morning of May 29, 1453, as Turkish Sultan Memhet II led his troops to sack the city that had so long eluded the Islamic world. In 1453 Christopher Columbus was just a baby in Genoa. But the fall of Constantinople had already shaped his fate. Although few Christians in Western Europe cared enough about the fate of Byzantium to send it any real help against the Ottoman Turks, European countries depended on Constantinople for much of their economic livelihood. It was the commercial link between Europe and the Silk Road that had stretched across Asia for centuries. A huge part of the medieval world economy was powered by spices, silk, and gold coins that traveled across this road, on a treacherous journey across the steppes and deserts of central Asia to China and points beyond.

After 1453, travel for Europeans on the Silk Road virtually ended. The various powers in central Asia that had previously facilitated travel and commerce on the Silk Road, such as the Mongols, had already begun to decline, and the Ottomans busied themselves with both consolidating their own empire in the Middle East and, especially in the 17th century, extending it into southeastern Europe. Indeed, in the decades after 1453, Europe fell into what we might today call a recession. Asian goods weren’t reaching markets in Europe, where in some places, such as Italy, demand was growing, not shrinking. Something had to be done.

Early modern trade routes: red is land, the “Silk Road,” and blue are water routes. Click for larger/more detail.

The Portuguese pioneered the idea of reaching the Orient over water as opposed to land. Indeed, you can argue that the fall of Constantinople jump-started the Age of Exploration. The Portuguese, making use of what Europeans knew about the world in the late 15th century, rationally decided to sail east around the horn of Africa to reach India, Southeast Asia and China. The Indian Ocean had been a hub of trade for much of the Middle Ages, so why not capitalize on what you had?

Columbus, by the 1480s a navigator and adventurer in his own right, turned this idea on its head. Why not sail west, not east? It is not true that most people in 1492 thought the world was flat. We have known since Greek times that the world was round, and even measured (correctly) its circumference. Columbus did think that reaching Asia by sailing west was far more feasible than most Europeans assumed, however. It was that assumption that sold Ferdinand and Isabella, and in August 1492 the anchors of Columbus’s ships raised for the last time before they touched the waters of the New World.

The Byzantines, with their passion for eschatology, had a prophecy that predicted the end of the world. One Byzantine theologian, I forget who, had fixed the date for the end of all things–and calculated it as what would ultimately be the year 1492. The Byzantine world ended in 1453, but forty years later you could say that, in a sense, the world did end with Columbus’s discovery–at least the world as it was known at that time. So the Byzantines were, in their own way, right.

10 thoughts on “Sailing west from Byzantium: Columbus and the fall of Constantinople.”

Great post Sean. There is a nice little story about how Manuel Chrysoloras, who was convinced to travel to Florence from Constantinople by his friend to teach there. With him we he brought over an unfinished translation of the book Ptolemy’s Geography, which he subsequently gave to his friend Angeli to finish. Angeli completed the translation Chrysoloras had started, apparently making this highly sort after text available to the West for the first time. The funny thing about it was as it became popular and copies were made with map attachments, no one realised it was inaccurate. Decades later as you have pointed out Christopher Columbus got a hold of this works, likely convincing him that sailing west to the indies would be a piece of cake!
Byzantium’s footprints are all over European history particularly during the Renaisance (If people only bother to look !)

Reblogged this on Yesterday Unhinged and commented:
In continuing with March’s theme of the age of discovery, I present to you Sean Munger’s post on the Byzantium and Christopher Columbus.

What does the fall of Constantinople have to do with the Age of Discovery? With the fall of a stable trading ally in the Eastern Mediterranean, trade along the silk road all but dried up for most of Europe. Necessity is the mother of invention. You see where this is going…

The Venetian monopoly over trade with the Levant and Genoese dominance in the western Mediterranean was another significant driver, as was the expansionism of Spain and Portugal following the Reconquista. Arguably the reduction in trade through the overland spice route was a result of Venice’s thirty year war with the Ottomans after the fall of Constantinople, rather than its fall in itself. When the Venetians and Ottomans came to terms, trade on the overland route revived. Throw in the search for Prester John, sugar production in the Canaries and the Madeiras, the Portuguese slave trade, and the ‘gold famine’ and you have a wide range of factors that drove the age of discovery before 1492.